Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans

EdwardianDandy writes "Web designer Khoi Vinh, whose firm Behavior is responsible for the redesign of the Onion, argues on publish.com that an upcoming contest to overhaul Slashdot's look will yield interesting results, but the outcome will suffer because the underlying architecture is off limits." Normally I don't post stuff "About" Slashdot here since I find meta naval gazing very boring, but this article has many good points about architecture and design, even if his whole premise is based on a contest that we haven't spent more than about 5 minutes thinking about, and is mostly just meant to be a fun way for users to contribute themes to Slashdot. If Khoi wants to enter the contest, we'll consider his designs along with everyone else's. (I'm sure we can't afford him tho). And if he (or anyone) wants to make changes more substantial than cosmetic CSS, I'd consider them too. The upcoming Slashdot Redesign contest is intended to be more about design than architecture, but good ideas are good ideas.

Anyone done work on this already?

[Short Circuit]

Mind showing off your work-in-progress?

Question for oldies.

[Almond Paste]

How old is the current design? Is this the originial design from whenever this site started? Enlighten me!

The onion redesign isn't very good

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the new Onion design too busy and hard to navigate. The old design was simple, clean and the Infographcs and American Voices were easier to read. Maybe that's just my opinion...

Theonion.com...

[Anonymous Coward]

is ridiculously obnoxious to view. Everything's too compressed and diffifult to find. There's nothing eye-catching or particularly aesthetically pleasing about the site any more. Also, it's so homogenized that I don't feel inclined to wade through all the same-sized font headlines to find funny stories. It frustrated me so much that I subscribed to the printed version instead. Unless /. is planning on going print, let's not do anything drastic...

so..

[ianmassey]

In effect, the site's information architecture *IS* up for redesign? possibly? thus negating the limiting factors of the original contest announcement? I agree with the article for the most part, in that good design is generally reliant for usability upon a solid foundation of content structuring underneath, but I think that in Slashdot's case, a hell of a lot of good could come from just scrapping and rewriting the "look and feel" from the ground up. Setting aside complaints about timeliness and originality of content lately, I think that Slashdot's main problem is that if anything, the information it contains is TOO categorized and divided. You could spend an hour just familiarizing yourself with all the various "sections", and that's not even considering shit like "Ask Slashdot" and other regular types of submissions/articles with their own special little names that would confound a newbie to the point of exasperation. There's no good way to simplify a juggernaut like slashdot, there is simply too much out there, and it has too large a community for any 180 degree changes in how it works. I think the best that can be done is a dramatic re-think of the UI, and a reliance on site search to get at the older innards.

Navel-gazing

[Speare]

Normally I don't post stuff "About" Slashdot here since I find meta naval gazing very boring,

This brings many things into sharp focus. Lack of ethical caching of small sites. Lack of basic story duplication review. Lack of basic grammar review. Lack of basic journalistic fact-checking. Troubling comments that charge karma backlash to those who defy the editors. Lack of awareness that Slashdot is expected by its subscribers and would-be subscribers to behave like the professional corporate concern which it is, and not an unpaid hobby blog which it may have been in the distant past.

Come on, Taco. Some regular "navel gazing" is how things improve over time. Is Slashdot worth so little to you?

No Changes!

[Evil W1zard]

One of the things I like about this website is the simplicity in viewing it and I really wouldn't want to see much changed. The only thing I would say to change is to kill some of the white space between posted articles and user comments, but that is really a minute nitpick... Slashdot has enough of a following that changing the site won't hurt numbers of visitors IMO but hopefully if they decide to go with a new spread it won't wind up being visually unappealing...

Slashdot's design is scandalously bad.

[windowpain]

Here I am posting a comment and I can't view the story I'm commenting on. That's ridiculous. And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot because the most important information is buried among a lot of trivia in the FAQs.

If Slashdot were a person it would wear taped together glasses, a pocket protector and floods.

News for nerds indeed.

Fetures I would like to see.

[jellomizer]

Being able to view submitted and pending stories and able for the comunity to vote for them. I don't know about the rest of you but there were many times when I posted a story that got rejected that the next week it was accecepted by someone else and it was a major thread. Also we will be able to find dupes quicker.

Secondly being able to edit your posts after you post it for spelling and grammar mistakes and just have the gammar nazis just send you a private message with the spelling and grammar mistakes for you to change if it makes sense.

Third More moderation options with different values. Like Over and Under Rated should have 1/2 point taken because it slips threw the meta moderation.

Common non moderators can put points on a message to so moderators can see what other people like or dislike and they can make a decision based off of that.

Moderators should know what metamoderators did to their moderation so they can reevaluate their actions.

Mod points shouldn't have a limit (while karma does) but the amount of moderation should go up logarmithicly. So you can get moderations of 6 and 7 but the higer it goes the more moderation it will take to get that high.

Over and Under rated messages should not be an option for unmoderated messages. Because they were not rated.

The point of most of my suggestions is to incorage positive posting and not rusing to get first posts early. Many time the comments are worth more then the stories but they are treated like they normal static to them.

Re:hands off!

[chesapeake]

The ill-conceived mistake that we call the Onion 'redesign' is absolutely appalling. They lost a reader in me too. It seems to be a very typical mistake: cramming loads of useless crap onto a single page, and making the site look like a clone of a 1920's newspaper. [fordham.edu] That said, the article pages are only moderately bad - like say, about as well designed as a high school student would do. All they need is a few blink tags to top it off.

What is it with these idiot designers? The web isn't a newspaper, adding extra pages to your site COSTS NOTHING.

(And apparently there are ads on The Onion? *plugs AdBlock*)

I submitted this back in August...

[amper]

and, of course, it was rejected. I archived to my Journal, but here it is...

I have found my self wondering of late whether or not the Moderation system of Slashdot (meaning, this site in particular, as opposed to the underlying implementation in Slashcode) would be more effective if a few changes were made.

For instance, it seems to me from my own experience, that readers are more likely to post in stories that cover a field in which the reader may have a particular expertise, yet the moderation system disallows those same posters from moderating any posts under the same topic. Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time? Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5? Why are we limited to single point changes?

Personally, I have my preferences set to display +4 and above, and most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating. I take my moderation very seriously, and I do not mod on a whim. In fact, many times when I am awarded moderation points, I end up allowing them to expire because I do not feel any affinity for the topics currently being discussed, I do not possess enough expertise in the topics being discussed, or I want to particpate in a debate. Again, those discussions I join tend to be those in which I have particular interest or expertise, and I suspect that many posters here would tell similar tales.

I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see. I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples. Perhaps other new moderation types would also help. Could we not open the moderation to all users at all times and do away with the five points at a time limitation by simply not allowing a particular user to moderate a particular post more than once?

I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases, and I'm wondering:

Where does the Slashdot community stand on these issues in 2005?

OUTLINE MODE: Please!

[mcguirez]

My biggest complaint with slashdot is that you can't hide a rathole.

Say there's a topic on space travel and someone chimes in about their breastfeeding theory and soon there's 85 replies: each one regaling us with a delightful and witty breastfeeding story that I'd just rather skip over. A collapsible outline format would allow the discerning reader to simply close irrelevant threads and subordinate branches.

Re:Slash Light

[duerra]

No one said that a Slashdot redesign would have to look like The Onion or anything like that. That doesn't make the *idea* bad, though.

Personally, I would like the ability to collapse sub-children in the comments. Sometimes you get so nested deeply in reading comment threads that the direct replies to what you originally started reading don't come until 20 minutes later. I'd rather read the direct replies, then go back and read replies to children, etc.

Re:Horrible changes so far:

[Doctor Memory]

Yes, I usually reserve my design spite for people who DON'T underline links in the first place. Esp. when they just display the text in another color, and they use that same technique for emphasis. Like I'm supposed to know that when text is in orange it's a link, and when it's in blue it's just to make a point. I'll be damned if I'm going to go hover over every odd-colored word just to see if my cursor changes.

Re:Slashdot software broken, bans entire subnets

[Anonymous Coward]

On Fark, you have to log in and comments can be deleted by the moderators, for one. Personally, I think that Slashdot could use this. Why not keep AC posting, but tie it to an account? Meaning you can post AC from your account, everyone sees it as AC, it doesn't affect your karma, but excessive bad posting can result in limiting posting from your regular account?

Re:ALL HAIL THE WEB SEPARATIONISTS

[Zphbeeblbrox]

ummm.... actually no. most of those enterprise CMS's now use CSS to manage how the content looks. The CSS may be generated and managed by the CMS and stored in a database but it is still CSS and thus subject to all the wonderful things you can do with it. Wordpress, Typo3, movable type, and many other CMS applications all use CSS to style their content. And HTML/XML to structure it. So your rant just shows you really don't know what your talking about. Large operations don't approximate the functionality of XML/CSS internally they use the functionality of XML/CSS internally.

As someone who develops custom CMS solutions on a regular basis for customers I can tell you I'd much rather use the prebuilt functionality of XML/CSS in my app than to have to use old style table based layouts.

Good and Bad Site Design

[some guy I know]

One major thing that brings me back to slashdot, is how easy it is on the eyes. You aren't assaulted with multiple columns of content or gaudy, interleaved ads. It's right to the point, top to bottom. [...] Slashdot also isn't like other tech news sites where you have 20% story, %80 related links or other fluff. [...] anything other than a chronological top down design would ruin what slashdot is.

I agree completely.
If you want to see an example of bad site design, of what Slashdot should avoid looking like at all costs, just look at publish.com, the site on which the article was posted.
Click on the link to TFA, and see what a bad web site looks like:

• The content is strung down a narrow column in the middle, with ugly gray gutters taking up nearly half of the screen real estate on either side.
• Nearly half of the remaining space is occupied by content that has nothing to do with the article, and half of it is ads,
  formatted
  in such
  narrow
  columns
  that only
  one or
  two words
  per line
  can fit
  in the
  space
  available.
• The article takes up only about half of the vertical space, with the rest populated by approximately 30-40 billion totally unrelated and totally uninteresting links.
• The story is interrupted periodically by links to other pages.
  (This is not the same thing as links to other pages appearing within the article text, which is perfectly acceptable.)
• Most of the pictures appearing on the page are for ads for other content having nothing to do with the article.
  There are actually no pictures on the page at all that have anything to do with the article itself.

Contrast this with Slashdot's current layout:

• There is a narrow bar at the top with links to other sites.
  IIRC, you can turn this bar off in your user preferences.
• There is a narrow column down the left side with a bunch of links to other areas of the site.
• There are a few (very few!) graphics near the top that link to related topics or sections, and the graphics are halfway decent looking and are actually somewhat indicative of the corresponding link (as opposed to the links on publish.com, many of which are photos of people that I don't know, and in whom I am not the least bit interested).
• There are several links to external pages, and some of them are to commercial sites, but they are all at least somewhat related to the main article.
• There is at most one, only mildy obtrusive, ad between the article and the comments.
• The comments section, which is the main section, takes up over 90% of the horizontal space, and is uniterrupted by ads, extraneous links, and other distracting garbage.

There is no doubt which site is better.

I highly recommend that C.T. not listen to the "pros" and "experts", who seem to be responsible for a large portion of the crap commercial web pages infesting the World Wide Web.

A few other recommendations, not covered in the above:

• Please let your users pick the color schemes, or at least give them a choice of schemes, so that they can avoid the games.* and it.* color schemes and the like.
• Please avoid using any Flash or ECMAScript/JavaScript/AnyScript, or at least provide a non-script fallback for those of us who have all of that crap disabled.
• Allow us to use more character entity references (such as °, ½, etc.) in comments.
• Don't count markup in sig lines as contributing to the 120-character limit.
  Also, increase the limit to 160 or higher, but don't allow any more than two or three newlines in a sig.

There are probably some other things, but I can't think of them right now.

Re:Slashdot software broken, bans entire subnets

[Matt Perry]

Again from Robert Rozeboom. I actually support slashdot, bought a subscription (yea I know it's only $10) and I can't post from home because someone who uses a Comcast cable modem is a troll?! What the fuck?!

Instead of complaining about it here why don't you write a nice snail mail letter to Slashdot's parent company [ostg.com] explaining the situation, that you are a paying customer, and that you are not happy. Things will only change if the parent corps management is made aware that they are pissing off customers. Even though your $10 isn't much you as a reader is much more valuable to them because you are why advertisers are willing to pay to advertise.